Ideas for MLK Day

January 19, 2014

Another week has flown on by! Here’s a peek at our MLK studies from the week…

We jumped right into our MLK Jr. studies this week! His birthday {real birthday} is January 15th so whenever possible that’s the day I like to get started. It’s a unit that’s near and dear to my heart as Martin and I are actually birthday buddies.

This week we spent a ton of time focusing on who Dr. King was. After reading about Martin Luther King Jr. this week, we were able to complete this Fact vs. False sort today.

The little one at the chart was celebrating a birthday, so the class agreed it would be fair to let her be the pocket chart Vana White for the activity. She’d read them out loud, then as a class we would decide where the card should go.

As luck would have it, our Scholastic readers also included an MLK timeline. This isn’t a text feature my first and second graders are very familiar with. They wanted to know, “What’s a timeline?” Well by Friday, my class knew exactly what a timeline was!

I’m so proud of my kids for the work they put into their Timeline Reports of Dr. King’s life!! This is one of my very favorite projects to watch them complete every year!

One of our finished timelines on proud display!

{Using the vocabulary words on display as she worked on a page}

The class knows if a word they need help spelling is displayed somewhere in the room it HAS to be spelled correctly. So I do a little internal happy dance when they start getting up and referencing these words on their own, like this sweetie did!!

Next week, we’re going to focus more on defining these very important words.

We’ll also write about our big dreams!

Here’s a quick idea for painting a picture of segregation in a way your students can relate to. I don’t really have the heart to be “meaner” to one group of students than another just to make a point. But an easy way to quickly and temporarily illustrate segregation is to set aside a tub of books from your class library. Put a small number of books into the tub. Pick a group of students (you can do all the boys, all the girls, or all the people with blonde hair, etc. ) and tell them that they are only allowed to read books from the tub. Everyone else in the room can still go in and pick books from your class library but the new law is that *this* group is no longer allowed to because they are ______. {boys, girls, brown haired- whatever you picked.} Let them know that you will switch out the books in their tub every 6 weeks or so. Now see what they think about that! When they tell you how unfair it is, ask the whole class, “Why would that be unfair?”

It’s a great way to get that dialogue started in a way that makes sense to them.

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Celebrating my birthday was a great time all around too! Twenty-eight, baby!!

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